Try to describe light and it's hopeless/ Nothing can quite catch in words luminous nothingness/ Hold something up in light and it's revealed in it say a/ miniature Easter Island head now brought out in its/ full strangeness by the surrounding illumination/ But how can you hold up something like light in light and hope to achieve/ the thing the flash the flat surrounding splashy airiness of brightness/ in whose beneficence everything/ including us is revealed?...

Poems of ecstatic movement, longing, glimpses and glimmers of the divine reality of our existence: Not a moment can be squandered / not a moment can be lost // Grab the rope and swing out / over the abyss // "What rope?" you say / when there are / ropes all around us // dangling at our elbows and lying in / coils at our feet // But invisible to our visible eyes // Our eyes must quit the visible / to see them

Sufi poems from the love-ocean, washing at the shores of this world and the next, with God willing a depth charge or two to find new love grottos, new heights in underwater drownings, new depths in aerial flights. Contradictions? As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself! I contain multitudes." And if we rub the self to its tissue-thin reality, God's Light shines more thoroughly through.

This poem was suggested in a flash by a paragraph in Michael McClure's book, "Scratching the Beat Surface," in which he quotes Ernst Haekel in the words used here as an epigraph, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." He goes on to say, in explanation, "Haekel meant that the individual, in his growth from meeting of sperm and ovum at conception, lives out, in fetus, the growth and evolution of his tribe; that first he is an amoeba, then a colonial organism, then an invertebrate, then a lancet, then a fish, until at last he is a mammal and a human." Reading this brought together for me various strands of thought into one clear picture, in harmony with the cosmological picture of the Muslim saints: "Man is a little cosmos, the cosmos is a big man." And the view that Allah created the entire creation as a setting, as it were, into which He placed man, the jewel, the perfect diamond, as the seal and culmination of this creation. ________________________________________________

Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our existence: perfect because created by a perfect Creator. A crime because we get up to such malfeasance all the time, at the lower end of it, and a crime at the higher end in the sense that the Sufis often mention, that any existence of theirs before Allah ta'ala, any flake or residue of their self-ness, is a crime, a flaw, an obstruction before the Light of God. Only when you have known a saint (wali) of whatever spiritual practice do you the sense of a personality honed to its finest before the divine consciousness, whose actions and words and thoughts are soaked in divinity to such a degree that the person is truly human in its essence and effaced before God in His ever-present and infinitely Merciful activity.

These poems consider (sometimes wildly) the inventions that are our lives, and their Inventor, the Divine Fashioner of ourselves and our actions, with passionate imagination, surreal humor, and abiding focus and love for that Fashioner, in all His manifestations.

The sound of geese over the house and in the house the prayer on the Prophet The sound of geese over the house and in the house Allah loves you The mountains are full of light and their gigantic shadows are eloquent since they're leaning against the sky and out into space with their crags and outcrops No sound can scale in a dimension commensurate with the pure expanse of it The sound of geese over the house puts a dome of life above us and a sea of life below us and a world of life all around us and a shaft of living Light inside us

This may be a secret among only a few of its recipients, but cancer is a direct and positive gift from God. Its chemo and radiation therapies wrack and ruin us... and its alternative therapies may bewilder us with the arcane and often whacky character of their methods... I chose the traditional medical program of three chemo and thirty-five radiation sessions, begun immediately after diagnosis of my cancer, and I praise Allah for the doctors who treated me with their medicine chest of tough love. _________________ Redemption happens the way/ water falls/ Forgiveness is air/ let into an airless room/ Even at the top of the highest peak/ we can't just step off into the sky/ At some point only God's Love has any reality/ and everything hangs enraptured from that ferocious hook/ Streams of light continue to enter us from we/ know now where/ The truth of our beings/ light streaming everywhere

.".".The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a spiraling staircase carrying love-notes and bringing back blessings and reprieves..."" I'm really not sure why this particular collection of my poems is called Blood Songs, the title it has had since beginning the first poem of the book written in October of 2000, and though, as with other titles of mine, not necessarily threading a theme throughout, yet the title stands notwithstanding... and so it stands.

As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia, from wherever we happen to find ourselves, farflung in some island fastness, or out in desert dunes, or in a New York hotel room. There are boat people who tie up and face Mecca right in their boats, saintly Moroccan merchants who fling their carpets down just behind the counter where they sell embroidery thread to very particular customers (I am a witness). We can't get too "far out" when we stop to face Mecca five times and more a day, or in the solitude of our nights, knowing the plumb line goes straight through to the next world, and its rising to the holy heights.